Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde (with Elina Druker)

This book is dedicated to Amiri Baraka, Chris Marker and Lebbeus Woods iv • "Innovation enters art by revolution. Reality reveals itself in art in much the same way as gravity reveals itself when a ceiling collapses on its owner's head. New art searches for the new word, the new expression. The poet suffers in attempts to break down the barrier between the word and reality. We can already feel the new word on his lips, but tradition puts forward the old concept." -Viktor Shklovsky • "This means that in the psychology and ideology of avant-garde art, historically considered (from the viewpoint of what Hegelians and Marxists would call the historic dialectic), the futurist manifestation represents, so to speak, a prophetic and utopian phase, the arena of agitation and preparation for the announced revolution, if not the revolution itself." -Renato Poggioli • "Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the constituencies that might support them, constituencies that are always limited by the entirety of social conditions. People from these tendencies who have been noticed are generally admitted on an individual basis, at the price of a vital repudiation; the fundamental point of debate is always the renunciation of comprehensive demands and the acceptance of a fragmented work, open to multiple readings. This is what makes the very term avant-garde, which when all is said and done is wielded by the bourgeoisie, somewhat suspicious and ridiculous." -Guy Debord • "In so far as the historical avant-garde movements respond to the developmental stage of autonomous art epitomized by aestheticism, they are part of modernism; in so far as they call the institution of art into question, they constitute a break with modernism.

2018

The narratives on avant-garde have been under deep scrutiny from as early as nineteenth century and keep resurfacing and metamorphosing with changing political, social, and economic factors. These narratives are specifically organised around moments of shock, rupture, youthful revolt and speak about how experimental art functions and about the nature of its gradual change.Over the years, avant-garde has undergone various phases and manifested itself through various movements of late nineteenth and twentieth century like Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism. Whatever phase or moment it must have been in, the aim of avant-garde art in pushing the boundaries and creating something new and innovative for making the world a better place has always been its hallmark.However, the utopian avant-garde, restyled into radical iconoclastic cultural movements of the first half of the twentieth century, eventually fell into the clasp of capitalism as the latter took over the entire West. The escalating ...

New Literary History, 2011

The avant-gardes have had their history. Since that time, their heroic past has been now relived in accounts in which the course of time is overturned and they re-emerge to “enliven their time” and accomplish history. Those today who want to serve or make their time must adjust the framework of the “institution of art” in accordance with recent practices. There is not one time frame here but several. Without the work of distinction and construction, avant-gardes, modernisms and, above all, totalitarianisms, all remain empty terms.

Fifty international contributors from various arts fields reflect on the meaning of the avant garde today.

Filosofski Vestnik, 2014

Modernism remains a complex and complicated term, contested not only with regard to its historical meaning or period boundaries but also with regard to its (continuing) relevance for aesthetics and, more broadly, for the contemporary understanding of art(s). This conceptual dilemma is in part due to modernism's implication within and sometimes uneasy relation to the historically and cognitively more capacious notion of modernity. Is modernism the culmination of modernity, its crowning moment, or perhaps its tipping point toward the purported postmodernity/postmodernism, or is the challenge, even revolution, instigated by modernism's artistic inventiveness-its avant-garde momentum-still extant and current beyond the apparent succession of modernism by postmodernism? In the opening sentence of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno diagnoses modernism as radically calling into question the very existence and pertinence of art: "It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, neither in it nor in its relation to the whole [zum Ganzen], not even its right to exist." 1 And even more poignantly a few sentences later: "It is uncertain whether art is still possible; whether, with its complete emancipation, it did not cut off and lose its own preconditions." 2 For Adorno, the uncertainty afflicting the very possibility of art's existence stems from what he sees as the fiasco of the avant-gardes: "The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed consumed the categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken." 3 In short, the avant-gardes were "too radical," as they eroded the very categories, chief among them the aesthetic notions of subjectivity, aesthetic experience, and judgment, that Adorno wants to redefine and yet preserve, in order to maintain art's critical relation to social antagonisms and suffering. Rejecting the "non-aesthetic" radicalism of Dadaists or of 1

Arcadia – International Journal for Literary Studies, 2006

How can we outline the historical and geographical spread of the so-called "historical avant-garde"? An examination of the historiographical status of a few movements that are commonly considered as part of this avant-garde illustrates the lack of a consensus. For instance, some accounts ascribe a pivotal or privileged role to cubism and expressionism, whereas others explicitly exclude them. Neither the self-understanding of the "historical avant-garde" nor the innovations of its literary, artistic, and political practices yield a satisfactory definition. Instead, we should start viewing the "historical avant-garde" as a network and map it out as a rhizomatic complex. Where did the European "historical avant-garde", as it has been evoked by Peter Bürger, Matei Calinescu and Jean Weisgerber, begin and end? 1 How can we delineate the historical and geographical spread of this avant-garde? Which currents, schools, movements, isms, projects, which artefacts, works of art, architecture, music, literary texts and other aesthetic and cultural practices can be subsumed under the umbrella label "avant-garde" in the early twentieth century? Straightforward as these questions may seem, they are seldom addressed today in studies of the avant-garde. However, an examination of just a few movements that are commonly considered as part of the "historical avant-garde" illustrates that a consensus is lacking. Major early twentieth-century isms, such as cubism, expressionism, fauvism and surrealism, are included by some scholars, and even attributed a pivotal or privileged role in their account of the avantgarde, whereas they are explicitly excluded by others. 2 On what grounds can dis-1